JAKARTA (foresthints.news) – After downloading the 2016-2020 Peat Restoration Roadmap from the website of the Indonesian Peat Restoration Agency, or BRG, (Mar 7), foresthints.news immediately conveyed several concerns concerning the substance of the roadmap document in writing to the Peat Agency Chief, Nazir Foead.

In Nazir’s written response to foresthints.news, received on the same day, he explained that the incorrect roadmap document had been posted on the website. This is the document that was mistakenly uploaded (pdf).

As such, it is important for any interested parties who downloaded the initially-posted roadmap document to know that this document was uploaded by mistake. The erroneously-uploaded roadmap document was dated 20 December 2016.

Unfortunately, the peat agency decided not to use its twitter feed or facebook page to announce that it had wrongly uploaded the roadmap document.

Thus, the news about the mistaken upload was only revealed to foresthints.newsafter downloading the document (Mar 7). In the more than a month since then, the peat agency’s website has been ‘under construction’, meaning that the correct version of the roadmap document has not been available.

As of today (Apr 10), the peat agency’s website remains ‘under construction’. In the correspondence between foresthints.news and the peat agency chief about the website’s ‘under construction’ status, Nazir said that his team was making improvements to the website.

Meanwhile, it is crucial for the (real) roadmap document to be made available so as to give all relevant stakeholders some insight into the peat agency’s restoration plans for 2016 to 2020.

Considering the importance of the roadmap document, especially in light of the peat agency calling it an integral part of its peat restoration planning efforts, foresthints.news continues to wait eagerly for the real roadmap to be uploaded to the peat agency’s website, after which it will report back on developments.

Unusable source of reference

Based on the presidential regulation which established the peat agency in early January last year, the primary obligation of the peat agency is to design a peatland restoration plan to serve as the basis for restoring as much as 2 million hectares of peatland from 2016-2020.

As the roadmap document downloaded by foresthints.news early last month was mistakenly uploaded, there is no way the public can use this document as a source of reference, particularly when it comes to providing input on the roadmap.

The ongoing unavailability of the real roadmap for relevant stakeholders, makes it difficult for them to conduct appropriate monitoring and verification of peat restoration efforts.

If this was merely a matter of uploading the wrong document, it would not have come to the point where, after over a month without any confirmation as to how much longer the wait will be, the real roadmap has still yet to be uploaded.

This, therefore, indicates that the peat agency has its own reasons for why its website remains 'turned off' more than a month since the mistakenly-uploaded roadmap incident.